[Corpora-List] EACL 2011 newsletter

[Stephen Clark]

The EACL newsletter for 2011 can be found at the EACL website:
http://www.eacl.org/
and also in text format below.
--

EACL Newsletter
Issue 14
November 2011

Table of Contents

1.    Editorial
2.    View from the Chair
3.    EACL Board 
4.    EACL 2012 in Avignon
5.    Report on ACL 2011
6.    Report on EMNLP 2011
7.    Report on RANLP 2011
8.    Report on IWCS 2011
9.    Report on ESSLLI 2011
10.   Calendar
--

1. Editorial

Welcome to the EACL newsletter for 2011. The newsletter starts with a
message from the chair of EACL, Sien Moens. Walter Daelemans reports
on the progress being made for EACL 2012, to be held in Avignon in
April, and then we have a series of reports on the various conferences
held in Europe in 2011 (plus ACL in Portland).

We have a number of new members on the EACL Board. I am the new
Chair-Elect; Alexander Koller, Kemal Oflazer, and Vivi Nastase have
joined the Advisory Board; and Konstantina Garoufi and Coskun Mermer
have joined the Student Board.

The Student Board has again carefully edited a dense calendar of
European and international events of interest that will soon take
place. The document is available via the EACL home page.

Stephen Clark
Editor
--

2. View from the Chair

Welcome to this new edition of the Newsletter of the European Chapter
of the Association for Computational Linguistics. These are exciting
years for the European community of computational linguists. There are
three conferences ahead of us, the 13th Conference of the European
Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics to be held in
Avignon, France on April 23-27, 2012; the 51st Annual Meeting of the
Association for Computational Linguistics to be located in Sofia,
Bulgaria in the summer of 2013; and the 14th Conference of the
European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
planned for the Spring of 2014 at a European or Middle East location
still to be decided. We are sure that these three conferences will
bring the varied and extensive European research in the spotlights
stirring up the interests of young bright researchers for the CL
field. We hope that the conferences make our national and European
policy makers and university leaders aware of the necessity to
increase the research funding in this area and to revise and adapt
educational programs to this growing research field. Research in
computational linguistics has exhibited extraordinary advances the
last decade, but still many of the CL goals are distant dreams.

We are very happy to announce in this newsletter all the inspiring
happenings that have shaped computational linguistics in Europe the
last year. We proudly announce that the initiative initiated by my
predecessor Giorgio Satta to revive the relationships with the
regional CL organizations in Europe, is continued. Again this year we
will publish an additional issue of the EACL newsletter that will be
entirely devoted to the conference and meetings of these regional
associations. As usual in this newsletter you read about the larger CL
events that show that CL is vibrantly alive and very active. Enjoy.

Sien Moens
EACL Chair
--

3. EACL Board

The current EACL board is composed as follows:

Chair: Sien Moens (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium)

Chair elect: Stephen Clark (University of Cambridge, UK)

Treasurer: Mike Rosner (University of Malta, Malta)

Secretary: Joakim Nivre (Uppsala University, Sweden)

Advisory Board:

Alexander Koller (University of Potsdam, Germany)
Toni Marti (Universitat de Barcelona, Spain)
Vivi Nastase (Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies, Germany)
Kemal Oflazer (Carnegie Mellon University - Qatar)

Student board:

Konstantina Garoufi (University of Potsdam, Germany)

Pierre Lison (German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence,
Saarbrucken, Germany)

Coskun Mermer (Bogazici University, Turkey)
--

4. EACL 2012 in Avignon, France

The preparation of EACL 2012 (http://www.eacl2012.org) in Avignon is
shaping up nicely. The program chairs Mirella Lapata and Lluis Marquez
guarantee an excellent programme. Three distinguished researchers have
accepted an invitation to present a keynote lecture: Regina Barzilay
(MIT), Martin Cooke (Ikerbasque), and Raymond Mooney (University of
Texas). Some of the calls are still open (call for papers, workshops,
system demonstrations, students research papers, ...), so check the
website for deadlines. The deadline for papers is November 4. The
program chairs invite submission of papers on original and unpublished
research in all areas of computational linguistics, broadly conceived
to include disciplines such as psycholinguistics, speech, information
retrieval, multimodal language processing, and language issues in
emerging domains such as bioinformatics and social media. The local
organization committee, chaired by Marc El-Beze, is working hard to
make the Avignon EACL a memorable conference. The conference will take
place at Sainte Marthe University Campus in a historical environment,
dating back as far as 1303. The city of Avignon is well known for its
ramparts, its famous Pont Saint-Benezet and the Palais des Papes, next
to which the conference dinner will be organized in rooms with a
breathtaking view of the Rhone river. The city is easy to reach by TGV
train, plane or car. We hope to welcome you to the only computational
linguistics conference in Europe next year!

Walter Daelemans
General Chair for EACL 2012
--

5. Report on ACL 2011

The 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational
Linguistics took place in Portland, Oregon, June 19-24, 2011. The
General Chair was Dekang Lin, and Program Co-chairs were Yuji
Matsumoto and Rada Mihalcea. The local arrangements were taken care of
by a team led by Brian Roark.

As in previous years, the conference started with a full day of
tutorials. This year, the tutorial session was chaired by Patrick
Pantel and Andy Way, who worked together with a small number of
reviewers to select the six final set of tutorials out of the 18
submitted.

For the main program, ACL 2011 received a total of 1,146 papers, out
of which 634 were submitted as long papers and 512 were submitted as
short papers. 25.9% of the long paper submissions and 25.0% of the
short paper submissions were accepted for presentation at the
conference. 116 of the long papers and 56 of the short papers had an
oral presentation, and 48 of the long papers and 72 of the short
papers were presented as posters. The papers were selected by a
program committee of 27 area chairs, from Asia, Europe, and North
America, assisted by a panel of 648 reviewers.

To achieve the goal of a broad technical program, following an
initiative from last year, papers under four different categories were
solicited: "theoretical computational linguistics,"
"empirical/data-driven approaches," "resources/evaluation," and
"applications/tools." Other types of papers (e.g., surveys or
challenge papers) were also accepted, although unlike the previous
year, no separate category was created for these papers.

A new initiative this year was to also accept papers accompanied by
supplemental materials (software and/or data) described in the
paper. In addition to the regular review of the research quality of
the paper, the accompanied resources were also reviewed for their
quality. Papers that were submitted with accompanying software/data
received additional credit toward the overall evaluation score, and
acceptance or rejection decision was made based on the quality of both
the research and the software/data components. Among all the
submissions, a total of 84 papers were accompanied by a software
package and 117 papers were accompanied by a dataset. Among all the
accepted papers, 30 papers are accompanied by software and 35 papers
are accompanied by a dataset. These materials are hosted on the ACL
web site, and are included in the proceedings together with the
corresponding paper.

The main program consisted of five parallel sessions for oral
presentations, and one poster session during the evening of the second
day of the conference. Long and short papers were distributed among
both the oral and poster sessions. Based on the recommendation
received from the student session co-chairs (Miles Osborne and Thamar
Solorio), it was decided that all the student session papers were also
presented during the poster session. In addition to the regular
presentations, demos were also presented during the second day of the
conference. The demo session was chaired by Sadao Kurohashi, who
worked together with a group of reviewers to accept 24 demo papers out
of the 46 submitted.

The conference also offered a mentoring service, which was chaired by
Tim Baldwin. An enormous amount of work has also been done by the
publications chair, Guodong Zhou, who in addition to putting together
the proceedings of the main conference, has also helped and advised
all the workshop chairs to compile their proceedings.

There were three awards, presented in a plenary session: one for the
best long paper, which went to Dipanjan Das and Slav Petrov for the
paper "Unsupervised Part-of-Speech Tagging with Bilingual Graph-Based
Projections"; one for the best long paper by a student, given to
Jonathan Berant for the paper "Global Learning of Typed Entailment
Rules"; and one for the best short paper, awarded to Brian Roark,
Richard Sproat and Izhak Shafran for the paper "Lexicographic
Semirings for Exact Automata Encoding of Sequence Models." The
conference also had two distinguished invited speakers: Dr. David
Ferrucci (Principal Investigator, IBM Research), who talked about his
team's work on building "Watson" - a deep question answering system
that achieved champion-level performance at Jeopardy!, and Lera
Boroditsky (Assistant Professor, Stanford University), who gave a
presentation on her research on how the languages we speak shape the
way we think.

The ACL's Lifetime Achievement Award went to Eugene Charniak, who gave
the closing talk of the conference on "The Brain as a Statistical
Information Processor."

After the conference, 15 workshops took place over two days, which
also included the Conference on Natural Language Learning (CoNLL). The
workshops were selected by the workshop co-chairs, John Carroll and
Hal Daume III, who worked together with the EMNLP co-chair to make
decisions for all the workshops submitted in response to a joint
ACL/EMNLP call for workshop proposals.

Overall, ACL 2011 was a great success, and also the "largest ACL ever"
-- a testimony that computational linguistics is an exciting field
that is steadily growing!

Rada Mihalcea and Yuji Matsumoto
ACL 2011 Program Co-Chairs
--

6. Report on EMNLP 2011

EMNLP 2011 --- the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language
Processing, a conference organised annually by SIGDAT, the Association
for Computational Linguistics' special interest group on linguistic
data and corpus-based approaches to NLP --- took place this year from
July 27th to 29th at the John McIntyre Conference Centre, Edinburgh,
UK.  This year's EMNLP was, for the first time, not only a stand alone
conference, but also an anchor conference to several workshops, that
were held on July 30th and July 31st at the Informatics Forum,
Edinburgh.  This year's conference continued the successful growing
trend of previous years, attracting the largest number of papers to
date for EMNLP and requiring a large organisational effort.  The
conference was preceded by a very interesting colocated event
sponsored by Google and the Scottish and Informatics Computer Science
Alliance: an Intense Summer School on Hadoop and Natural Language
Processing.

http://conferences.inf.ed.ac.uk/emnlp2011/

This was the first time EMNLP had a general chair, Paola Merlo,
Geneva, Switzerland.  The scientific programme chairs were Regina
Barzilay, MIT, US, and Mark Johnson, Macquarie University, Australia.
Publication chair was Wanxiang Che, Harbin Institute of Technology,
China.  Workshop chair was Marie Candito, Paris 7, France.  Local
arrangements were being organised by Bonnie Webber and Miles Osborne,
University of Edinburgh.

The list of 20 area chairs can be found at
http://conferences.inf.ed.ac.uk/emnlp2011/area-chairs.html

EMNLP received 628 submissions (not counting papers that were
withdrawn or rejected without review).  We were able to accept 95
papers as talks and an additional 54 submissions as posters.  The
reviewing process was a two-round review with author response period.

This year's conference was innovative in several ways. The conference
contained three additional plenary sessions compared to previous EMNLP
conferences; these were used to highlight a diverse set of papers of
interest to the entire EMNLP audience. We hope this will help counter
the disciplinary fragmentation that some of us feel the standard
multi-track conference structure encourages and were in general
appreciated by the participants.

For the first time, submitted papers could be optionally accompanied
by up to 10MB of supplementary material, which could consist of data,
code, and text. Papers could reference the supplementary material in
much the same way a paper might refer to software or a tech report
available from the authors' web site (albeit without revealing the
authors' identities).  Reviewers were encouraged but not required to
view the supplementary material.  We did include these unreviewed
materials in the proceedings. Roughly 20% of the papers took advantage
of this option.

A major challenge this year concerned undisclosed double submissions
and plagiarism (especially self-plagiarism) involving papers accepted
at other international conferences. We believe this is an issue that
must be addressed by the broader research community.

The conference attendance largely exceeded the 400 people, and the
weather was uncharacteristically dry and sunny.

Paola Merlo
General Chair for EMNLP 2011
--

7. Report on RANLP 2011

The biennial conference Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing
(RANLP) has established itself as one of the most competitive and
internationally recognised NLP events. The 8th International
Conference RANLP 2011, held from 12 to 14 September 2011 in Hissar,
Bulgaria, is the latest one in the series. It was preceded by 6
tutorials, given on 10 and 11 September, and followed by five
workshops organised on 15 and 16 September. The RANLP 2011 Student
Research Workshop was held on 13 September as part of the main
conference programme.

This year 120 regular, short or poster papers were presented at the
conference, authored by researchers from 42 countries. The papers
cover a variety of topics, among them event and relation extraction,
POS tagging, parsing and grammars, summarisation, generation and
machine translation, NER, sentiment analysis, text and discourse
segmentation, coreference resolution, semantic processing, knowledge
acquisition, annotation and resources, dictionaries and
terminologies. The selection rate of the regular papers was 17%. The
poster sessions included demo presentations as well. The submitted
papers were reviewed by a Programme Committee consisting of 68
well-known experts. The very short reviewing turn-around time (3-4
weeks) was possible due to the dedicated support from 88 reviewers,
plus the Program Committee. RANLP 2011 published Proceedings,
available at the conference site. It will be soon uploaded at the ACL
Anthology.

The keynote speakers at RANLP 2011 gave six invited talks:

o Ido Dagan (Let computers think - in human language!)
o Patrick Hanks (How people use words to make meanings)
o Inderjeet Mani (Getting Oriented: Spatial Prepositions, Frames of
   Reference, and Spatial Reasoning)
o Roberto Navigli (Is it just a waste of time? Word Sense
   Disambiguation for the skeptic)
o Pierre-Paul Sondag (Language Technologies: A broad EU overview)
o Hans Uszkoreit (Research Results and Technology Visions for
   Multilingual Europe)

whereas tutorial speakers and the titles of their tutorials were:

o Kevin Bretonnel Cohen (Software testing and quality assurance for
   natural language processing)
o Patrick Hanks (Practical Corpus Pattern Analysis)
o Erhard Hinrichs (WebLicht - A Service-Oriented Architecture for
   Multi-lingual Webservices)
o Zornitsa Kozareva & Preslav Nakov (Web Knowledge Extraction and
   Applications)
o Inderjeet Mani (Modeling Narrative Structure: Foundations of
   Computational Narratology)
o Lucia Specia & Wilker Aziz (Fundamental and Advanced Approaches to
   Statistical Machine Translation)

The following workshops were held as accompanying events at RANLP
2011:

o Robust Unsupervised and Semi-Supervised Methods in Natural Language
   Processing (15 September, organised by Chris Biemann and Anders
   Sogaard)
o Annotation and Exploitation of Parallel Corpora (15 September,
   organised by Kiril Simov, Petya Osenova, Jorg Tiedemann and Radovan
   Garabik)
o Biomedical Natural Language Processing (15 September, organised by
   Guergana Savova, Kevin Bretonnel Cohen, and Galia Angelova)
o Information Extraction and Knowledge Acquisition (16 September,
   organised by Preslav Nakov, Zornitsa Kozareva, Kuzman Ganchev, and
   Jerry Hobbs)
o Language Technologies for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage
   (16 September, organised by Petya Osenova, Stelios Piperidis, Milena
   Slavcheva, and Cristina Vertan)
o Student Research Workshop (13 September, organised by Irina
   Temnikova, Ivelina Nikolova and Natalia Konstantinova)

All workshops have published proceedings which will be uploaded at the
ACL Anthology.

This year RANLP joined the LRE Map Initiative and asked the authors of
all submitted papers to fill in a form describing the resources used
in their research. About one half of all authors (i.e. for 90 papers)
have declared the respective language resources. Some 25 papers
present results using newly developed resources; 11 papers discuss
methods and tools for updating existing resources.

RANLP 2011 had 180 participants which is a record number in the
conference history.

The event was sponsored by Ontotext Bulgaria.

The informal team behind RANLP includes Galia Angelova (Organising
Committee Chair), Kalina Bontcheva, Ruslan Mitkov (Programme Committee
Chair), Preslav Nakov, and Nikolai Nikolov. Kiril Simov was the
workshop coordinator. The Programme Committee Coordinators were
Ivelina Nikolova, Irina Temnikova and Natalia Konstantinova.

Galia Angelova, Chair of the Organising Committee 
Ruslan Mitkov, Chair of the Programme Committee
--

8. Report on IWCS 2011

January 12-14, 2011
Oxford, UK

The 9th International Conference on Computational Semantics (the major
conference of SIGSEM) was held in Oxford, UK. It took place at the
Computing Laboratory at the University of Oxford and its local
organisation was in the safe hands of Steve Pulman. This was the first
time IWCS was staged outside the Netherlands -- until 2009 all IWCS
events were organised by Harry Bunt and took place in Tilburg.

The 2011 edition of IWCS attracted a record number of 110 submissions,
of which 50 papers were accepted (30 long, regular papers, and 20
papers that were presented as posters). The programme was complemented
by two invited speakers: Harry Bunt (Tilburg University), and Eduard
Hovy (Information Sciences Institute).

The IWCS conference covers all areas that relate to computational
aspects of meaning of natural language within written, spoken, or
multimodal communication. Traditionally, there is both space for
formal approaches and more practically oriented work, as well as for
computational approaches to lexical semantics and corpus-based
research. In the Oxford edition of IWCS it was interesting to see that
a lot of current research is directed towards employing statistical
methods in computational semantics. In particular, several papers
targetted the problem of compositionality in a distributional semantic
framework.

The proceedings of IWCS 2011 are available via the online ACL
Anthology.  An extensive conference report (including pictures)
written by Elena Cabrio can be found at the SIGSEM webpage:
http://www.sigsem.org/wiki/IWCS-9_Conference_Report

IWCS is organised every two years. The next IWCS is scheduled for
2013, and will take place in Potsdam, Germany.

Johan Bos
University of Groningen
President of ACL SIGSEM
--

9. Report on ESSLLI 2011

For the past 23 years, the European Summer School in Logic, Language
and Information (ESSLLI) has been organized every year under the
auspices of the Association for Logic, Language and Information
(FoLLI) in different European cities. The main focus of ESSLLI is on
the interface between linguistics, logic and computation. ESSLLI
offers foundational, introductory and advanced courses, as well as
workshops, covering a wide variety of topics within the three areas of
interest with a strong interdisciplinary component. The school has
developed into one of the most important international annual events
in Europe, where dozens of distinguished lecturers and researchers
present their courses, organize workshops, and exchange ideas on a
wide variety of topics in the areas of logic, language, and
computation to highly motivated master and doctoral students and young
researchers from Europe and elsewhere.

The 23rd European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information
(http://esslli2011.ijs.si/) took place during August 1-12 in
Ljubljana, Slovenia. It was organized by the Slovenian Language
Technologies Society (SDJT), the Jozef Stefan Institute (IJS) and The
Faculty of Mathematics and Physics (FMF). Chair of the Program
Committee was Makoto Kanazawa (National Institute of Informatics,
Tokyo), and Chair of the Organizing Committee was Darja Fiser
(University of Ljubljana). During these two weeks 400 participants
could choose from a rich and varied programme of 44 courses and 7
workshops which were offered by more than 100 renowned lecturers and
researchers. All the course materials are available on the Moodle
teaching platform (http://esslli.fmf.uni-lj.si/).

Besides the regular courses, a traditional highlight of the summer
school were the 4 evening lectures by distinguished academics:
Benedikt Loewe (Universiteit van Amsterdam), Mirella Lapata
(University of Edinburgh), Bart Geurts (University of Nijmegen) and
Dunja Mladenic (Jozef Stefan Institute). Their lectures were recorded
and are available on the videolectures.net portal
(http://videolectures.net/esslli2011_ljubljana/).

Another traditional event at ESSLLI 2011 was the student session,
organized by a student programme committee which was chaired by Daniel
Lassiter (Stanford University). This session enabled master and
doctoral students to present their work to fellow students and senior
researchers. In total, 16 papers and 6 posters were presented and
evaluated by area experts, so that at the end of the summer school the
3 best paper/poster awards were presented to Alex Silk, Nal
Kalchbrenner and Annika Deichsel.

The Beth Dissertation Awards were announced at the FoLLI General
Meeting and were presented to Nils Bulling (TU Clausthal) and Mohan
Ganesalingam (University of Cambridge). ESSLLI 2011 also hosted the
16th Formal Grammar Conference and honoured the sad death of a strong
supporter of ESSLLI and a former FoLLI president Prof. Paul Gochet
with a memorial service.

Apart from the busy academic programme, participants of the summer
school were offered an exciting social program as well. In addition to
the traditional ESSLLI Party and the famous Students vs. Lecturers
Soccer Match, two excursions to the coast and the mountains were
offered. The photos from all the events at the summer school are
available in the photo gallery
(http://esslli2011.ijs.si/?page_id=1854).

The budget of ESSLLI 2011 was based mainly on the participants'
registration fees, with additional funding from the national research
agency, local and international cultural institutions and academic
organizations and business. In line with the ESSLLI tradition, all
teaching and organizing work for the summer school was done on a
voluntary basis. Lecturers and workshop organizers were not paid for
their contribution but were reimbursed for part of their travel and
accommodation cost. This financial policy made it possible to keep the
participation at the school affordable for graduate students, and to
award several grants to underprivileged but highly motivated students
who would have otherwise been unable to attend the summer school.

To conclude, ESSLLI 2011 was an extremely successful and memorable
academic and cultural event, and many of the participants are already
looking forward to the next edition of the ESSLLI series, which will
take place in Opole, Poland (http://www.esslli2012.pl/), during August
6-17 2012. Chair of the Program Committee of ESSLLI 2012 is Andreas
Herzig (Institut de recherche en informatique de Toulouse and CNRS),
and Chairs of the Organizing Committee are Janusz Czelakowski and
Urszula Wybraniec-Skardowska (University of Opole).

Darja Fiser
Chair of the Organizing Committee of ESSLLI 2011
--

10. Calendar

The Calendar can be found by clicking on the link at the top left of
the EACL web pages: http://www.eacl.org/

--
Stephen Clark
University Senior Lecturer
University of Cambridge
Computer Laboratory

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sc609/


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